Webvanta CMS Technology Stack

The Best of Open Source

We choose the very best open source technologies and package them into a fully supported, easy-to-use system that assures you of top performance while insulating you from the occasional chaos of the open-source world.

Server-Side Technologies

Webvanta is built with the Ruby on Rails web application framework, using the Ruby programming language.

The WebvantaScript syntax and the parser have been derived from the Radius tag language, which is part of the Radiant CMS created by John Long. We've also borrowed from Radiant's approach to page construction, using templates, content regions, and snippets.

Our servers use the Linux operating system, several nginx HTTP servers, HAProxy load balancer, multiple Mongrel application servers, memcached in-memory cache, and clustered MySQL database servers.

Site search is implemented with the Ultrasphinx client for the Sphinx full-text search engine.

We use Capistrano to manage our servers and Git and Github for version control.

We monitor server performance using New Relic, and make sure it all keeps running with Monit.

SiteUpTime makes sure our phones ring the moment anything goes wrong.

Our servers are hosted and managed by Engine Yard.

Offsite backups are made daily to Amazon S3.

Client-Side Technologies

We use a variety of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery (our preferred library for most things), YUI (for some legacy bits), and Prototype and Scriptaculous on the admin side of things.

Among the jQuery plugins we use are jQuery UI, Form, Superfish (drop-down menus), and Gallerific (photo gallery).

The Cufon JavaScript library allows us to use any font while retaining the accessibility and SEO of plain text.

For playing video, we use Flowplayer.

We use the Blueprint CSS framework to provide browser-independent formatting and simple creation of multicolumn layouts.

Our rich text editor is based on FCKeditor. The code editor is based on CodeMirror.

Fonts and Icons

We use a variety of icons from the Crystal Project and a few from the Bright! icon set by Min Tran.

Our headline and logo font is Omnes from Darden Studio.

On the admin side of Webvanta, we use some of the Silk icons from Mark James of FamFamFam.